OPEN COURSES

ARTH 801/4 Somewhere Between Local and Global

Offered: 2020 /4Credits: 3

It is a commonplace that nationalism as a suitable companion or container for art has been under review since the relationship first developed, neither “nation” nor “art” being particularly precise, transparent, or stable, concepts and both, as rallying points, being highly susceptible to, and productive of, propaganda and economic opportunity. Any drift in global politics, economics, or technology causes ripples in cultural activity; the seismic shifts since 1989 have had their effects as artists and art historians – citizens after all – have been struggling to redefine their fields of operation.

But if national art history is headed for the junkyard, its replacement has not yet arrived. A productive uncertainty prevails. The global project is periodically announced and maintained by interim solutions of reorientation and classification that never quite pan out. Both hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith justly observes: “Globalization has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform the world in their image” (“The State of Art History,” Art Bulletin, December 2010, 379). Almost a decade later, and we are still just getting started. Words matter, and any convenient shortcuts threaten to perpetuate prejudicial divisions. “The first thing,” said Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2017 keynote at the AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) Congress in Paris, “The first thing is to stop thinking non-European.” Art history’s historiographical literature is shot through with speculation and paradox, which keeps the discussion lively, if sometimes disconnected. The big thinking that should be compatible with world-making sometimes falters before the scariness of the endgame – the prospect that real change, affecting more than curriculum and curatorial units, is taking place.

This seminar addresses the ongoing intra- and interdisciplinary debates over the legitimacy and function of national art histories, in relation to three factors: globalization, disciplinary redefinition, and methodological restlessness. It will make use of an edited collection, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017) to extract and critically analyze the contributors’ methodologies, as applied to Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the so-called art cities, including Cairo, Dubai, New York, and Vancouver. These readings and other sources are intended to help members of the seminar to position their own research.

The “unfinished world” figured in the title of Narratives Unfolding is a plural concept: it captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history today, as well as the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions that elevate certain events of cultural practice, while abstracting them from place and time. On this phenomenon, we will pause and reflect, for however broad our perspectives, each of us is positioned “somewhere” between local and global, between the centre (as sensed) and all points imaginable. This seminar can be useful to any emerging art historian who wants to be reflexive about their place in the field, and in the world at large.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the inter-university PhD program in Art History.

GDBA 531 Professional Business Skills

Offered: 2019 /2 /3Credits: 3

This course provides students with the necessary skills that help with successful interaction with others in business settings. Topics include designing and delivering effective written and oral messages from concept to delivery, working in groups, and negotiating and resolving conflict by using ethical communication tactics. Pedagogical methods include group-based work, in-class workshops, case studies, presentations and report writing.

Prerequisites: Must possess an undergraduate degree in any field.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students admitted to GDBA, GCBA, GCQBS, and GCE.

CHME 6021 Advanced Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics

Offered: 2019 /2Credits: 4

Topics include principles, concepts, and laws/postulates of classical and statistical thermodynamics and their link to applications that require quantitative knowledge of thermodynamic properties from a macroscopic to a molecular level; basic postulates of classical thermodynamics and their application; criteria of stability and equilibria; constitutive property models of pure materials and mixtures, including molecular-level effects using statistical mechanics; equations of state; phase and chemical equilibria of multicomponent systems; and thermodynamics of polymers. Applications are emphasized through extensive problem work relating to practical cases. A project is required.

CHME 6031 Chemical Kinetics and Reaction Engineering

Offered: 2019 /4Credits: 4

Topics include applied chemical kinetics and their use in chemical reactor design and chemical plant operation where both homogeneous and heterogeneous kinetics, including catalysis, are considered; residence time distribution; dispersed plug flow reactors; radial mass and heat transfer limitation; mass and heat transfer limitation in and around catalyst pellets; and multiphase reactors. A project is required.

COMS 873/4 Identities and Cultural Exchange

Offered: 2019 /4Credits: 3

What is the subject, the self, and its relation to politics? How is identity politically, socially, and culturally positioned in relation to otherness, in and through the circuits of cultural exchange that bring communities into encounters that are both powerful and threatening? These questions are poignant in the contemporary geopolitical context, under the conditions of continued domination and exploitation, the emergence of new right-wing populisms, newly inflamed culture wars and state and non-state sponsored forms of violence, as well as in the search for new forms of belonging, survival and thriving in the 21st century. This doctoral seminar is organized as a “toolbox” course, examining how the politics of recognition open us both to the social relations that found human subjectivity, as well as to how asymmetrical forms of recognition may lead to misrecognition or injury. We will trace together a) the concept of “recognition” back to its origins, in the work of G.W.F. Hegel (as well as through Alexandre Kojève and Herbert Marcuse and others), b) foundational critiques within critical accounts of race (Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James) and gender (Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Wynter, Judith Butler), c) its elaboration and field of debates within discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics (Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib), d) and challenges to the structures of recognition in contemporary examinations of identity and cultural exchange within critical race studies (Moten, Sexton, Hartman, Sharpe), feminist and queer theory (Butler, Muñoz, Halberstam, Preciado), Indigenous studies (Coulthard, Simpson, Tallbear), postcolonial theory (Bhabha, Mbembe, Chakrabarty, Mohanty), and posthumanism (Haraway, Tsing, Chen). Ultimately, students will develop together a language for addressing the politics of difference and identity in the contexts of contemporary cultural exchange, attentive to the political, economic, cultural and ethical stakes of such investigations. We will complement this theoretical work with concrete cultural examples that flesh out and enrich our theoretical investigations.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to graduate students in Communication Studies. For all other students, registration is subject to permission of the course instructor (Krista Lynes).

FMST 804 Media Genealogies of the Digital

Offered: 2019 /4Credits: 3

This course examines key genealogies informing “new” and “digital” media studies, paying close attention to the marginalized forms and “pirate modernities” that exceed such categorizations. The seminar will introduce canonical works and influential scholarship from a range of disciplines—from critical data studies and disability studies to critical race studies and media theory. We will examine key historical and conceptual debates, including mass and social media, network cultures, media infrastructures, surveillance, discrimination, paranoia, machine learning, labor, risk, smartness, addiction, participation, and attention, among others. Special attention will be paid to the tensions between our perceptions of technology and its actual operations and to technology’s intersections with social/cultural formations (gender, sexuality, race, global flows).

Prerequisites: PhD standing.

Special instructions: Required books for the course:

Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)

Marisa Elena Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country (University of Washington Press, 2017)

This course provides a unique opportunity for students to take a selection of the Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR) offered by the Department of Political Science for credit.

The WSSR are intensive short learning experiences designed to enhance your knowledge and skills in the areas of democratic governance and public policy. These workshops are led by highly reputable and insightful guest lecturers from well-known academic institutions and/or well-qualified and distinguished backgrounds. For this course, you must select, register in, and attend six workshops, as well as complete all the requirements listed in this outline below.

Prerequisites: Graduate students from all faculties are welcome to take the WSSR for credit. Be sure to consult with your Graduate Program Director (GPD) in order to confirm that you are eligible to receive credit toward your degree. Please email confirmation of eligibility from your GPD to wssr@concordia.ca once you have completed and submitted your "Permission Request" form (see below). See a list of Concordia GPDs and GPAs.

Special instructions:

To apply for permission to register for this course, students need to complete the Permission Request Form on the website.

To earn credit for this course, students will select, register in, and attend six days-worth of workshops (9:00am-4:30pm). The listing of workshops can be found on the website.

RELI 823 - Historiography, Religion and Power

Offered: 2019 /2Credits: 3

In this course, we will track three themes. We begin with a brief examination of the history of the disciplines of the History of Religions, and of Comparative Religion. This leads us to the second theme we will be concerned with: historiography. We will consider the character of the sources we can use for making histories, and the nature and value of different approaches to historical study, especially in terms of their value for elucidating religious change and processes of religious interaction. The third theme is an extended treatment of colonialism, globalization, post-colonialism, decoloniality, and secularism as elements in or perspectives on contemporary religions and cultures.

Prerequisites: Open to PhD students only, with approval of instructor.

Special instructions: Course of interest to students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

ANTH 620 - Ethnographic Writing

Offered: 2019 /4Credits: 3

This writing seminar aims to help students who have already carried out ethnographic field research transform their fieldnotes into ethnographic writing, develop their own ethnographic voice and adopt a productive writing routine. The course encourages students to cultivate a critical and reflexive approach to ethnographic writing, and to master the art of building an anthropological argument by drawing on their own ethnographic findings.

The seminar encourages peer-to-peer learning as well as learning through doing, and is designed to help students progress in the writing up of their dissertation. It therefore has an important practical component: the writing load is very heavy and the reading load, a little less so. As they develop their writing skills, students will also learn to assess and engage with other forms of ethnographic writing, through readings and peer-reviews, and to situate their own ethnography in relation to relevant bodies of literature. They will also develop their oral presentation skills by presenting their work and discussing the work of their colleagues. Only students who have already conducted ethnographic field research, and who therefore have their own research material to work with, can sign-up for this seminar.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. For all other students, registration is subject to permission of the course instructor (Julie Archambault).

SOCI 650 - Media Sociology: Studies in Truth and Democracy

Offered: 2019 /1 Credits: 3

The current political and media landscape has social scientists and pundits perplexed as to how to explain the tenacity of deeply opposing world views and truth claims threatening the stability of liberal democracies around the world. The course raises two kinds of questions for in depth discussion: 1. What are the diversity of approaches (political economy, field theory; cultural sociology, actor network theory; critical sociology; postructuralism, posthumanism) that study these divisions through media and crisis in politics and journalism (professional work culture, technology, aesthetic, discourse, organization, ideology). And 2. Have journalism, politics, and social science contributed in some way to the present divisiveness? Each of these disciplines (or interdisciplines) are first level observers of events, but each has a different interest in sources, constituents, and/or actors/actants as well as in the relations between fact, opinion, and truth. Does the existence of conflicting views represent a strength or weakness in social science? Will democratic politics survive the next internet? Is journalism a parasite of civil society, or on the front line of ‘resistance’ to power?

Special instructions: Priority will be given to graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. For all other students, registration is subject to permission of the course instructor (Greg Nielsen).

Registration process

Please be advised that the School of Graduate Studies does not handle registration for these courses. You will need to contact the Graduate Program Assistant, Graduate Program Director (GPD), or the individual professor responsible for the course in question, depending on the directives that accompany the course.

1

Contact your current GPD to ensure that the course you are interested in will be recognized in your own program.*